Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by acknowledging all the work the member for Trinity—Spadina has done on this aspect of Bill C-50. I know many other members of the New Democratic Party have risen in the House to raise concerns around the immigration aspect of Bill C-50, and I will add my voice to those other voices who have spoken out against what many would allege as a potential abuse of power by the immigration minister.
One of the things we know from the throne speech, the budget speech and now the budget implementation bill is there are some very serious issues that face our country with which the bill is simply failing to deal, whether it is forestry communities like mine where we have lost hundreds and hundreds of jobs over the last six months and now many forestry workers have run out of employment insurance because of the way the unemployment rate in our area is determined and there is no remedy for these forestry, or the fact that first nations, Métis and Inuit across the country still suffer from a lack of good, safe, quality housing, or first nations children cannot access the same quality of schools that other Canadian children can expect, or that many communities simply do not have access to clean, safe drinking water, or where many families are unable to access quality affordable publicly funded child care.
Once again, the bill was an opportunity to take a look at some of these very pressing and urgent matters facing workers and their families across the country.
However, we are talking specifically about immigration, and I will turn my attention to it.
In preparation for speaking in the House today, I asked my office to take a look at a variety of the immigration and refugee cases they dealt with as case work. The government alleges that this legislation would deal with the backlog. Yet we hear from people, fairly consistently, that this will simply shuffle the priorities around without dealing with the substantial numbers of people who want to come to Canada and make it their home.
There are a myriad of problems with which my office deals, so this is a quick look at some of the things we face in our office in Nanaimo—Cowichan.
One of the problems is the length of time it takes to process applications. It is difficult to see how resetting different priorities would deal with the length of time of applications. It will certainly fast track some people. It will certainly make some people get to Canada more quickly. However, when we are dealing with the 900,000 plus who are currently in the system, I fail to see how, without substantially more resources, juggling people around will deal with that substantial backlog.
The second is the arbitrary decisions of immigration and visa officers and the lack of appeal venues. Many times we have seen the applications of people turned down. The supporting documentation by the person who applies to come to the country seems to be all there, yet the reasons of the denial do not seem to match up with the information on file. Sometimes the lack of clear and effective communication between applicants and immigration staff is problematic. People do not exactly know why they have been turned down. What we have seen in many cases is applicants will be requested to provide a particular information. The applicants provide that piece of information and then the staff will come back and say that they now need another piece of information. Therefore, applicants provide that information, and this goes on month after month.
In another case a fairly prominent member of the community was getting married. This person wanted to bring in her mother and sister to Canada. All the appropriate forms were filled out and the office abroad said that the sponsoring person in my riding of Nanaimo—Cowichan had to make a decision. Either her mother or her sister could come to the wedding, but not both. This was not an application for immigration. It was simply a visitor's visa. However, the legislation will not address all of those problems in the system,
I know member for Trinity—Spadina and others have called for stand-alone legislation that would go in front of the immigration committee, where there would be an opportunity to fully review the legislation, to call witnesses, to talk about how the legislation would impact people's lives and to potentially amend it so it would be more reflective of what Canadians wanted to see in immigration legislation.
Unless we are one of the original peoples, each and every one of us in the House came from immigrant stock at one point. My mother is a first generation Canadian, I am very proud to say. My daughter-in-law is an immigrant. My grandson is a first generation Canadian on the mother's side.
Each and every one of us, at some point, are ancestors, unless we were one of the original peoples. We are immigrants. We know that immigrants have contributed to the richness and the diversity of ours country. We want an immigration system that reflects what we often have valued as Canadians, and that is fairness and transparency, equality of access, timely processing, which, sadly, is not the case right now.
A number of groups across Canada have spoken out and raised serious concerns about the legislation, including the bar association. It has said, “The Canadian Bar Association is urging Parliament to remove and not pass amendments”, calling them “a major step backwards in the evolution of Canadian immigration law.
Bill C-50 would return Canada “to a time when visas were given out on a discretionary basis, without sufficient objective criteria” said Stephen Green. He said, “the amendments are not necessary to meet Canada’s immigration goals”. He went on to say that the amendments were not necessary to meet Canada's immigrations goals. The changes would fast-track highly coveted immigrants, such as doctors and other skilled labourers, while others would be forced to wait in a queue. They would allow governments to set annual limits on a number of applications process.
Part of the argument around the legislation as well is that it would help us address critical skills shortages in Canada. Any of us who had been paying attention over the last 15 or 20 years knew quite well there would be some very serious critical skills shortages in a number of areas and called on the federal and provincial governments to jointly develop a human resource strategy that would address some of those critical skills shortages, whether it was in trades apprenticeships, or physicians, nurses, medical technologists, the list goes on and on. We have had 15 to 20 years. The baby boom was no surprise. We knew it was coming. We knew there would be a massive wave of retirements. Anybody could predict that Canada would be in some periods of economic growth, which would require a skilled labour force to meet those needs.
Instead, we have had successive federal governments simply sit on their hands instead of turning their energy into developing a human resource strategy that would address these critical skills shortages.
The Vancouver Olympics is a really good case in point. The Vancouver Olympics, once it was awarded, was an opportunity to train apprentices in Canada. Many first nations and Métis in British Columbia would have made highly qualified tradespeople, with some effort and attention. Instead, we are meeting much of the needs of the Olympics with temporary foreign workers. It was an opportunity to train first nations and Métis in the construction trades that would have left a legacy in their own communities once the Olympics was over. That would have been a true legacy left by the Olympics.
However, again, the federal government failed to move in that direction. Working closely with the provincial governments, it had an opportunity to do that and it failed. We now have workers coming in, building the buildings, the roads, all the structures that go into place to support the Olympics. Then they will leave and we will still have first nations and Métis who could have been quite successful tradespeople. It was a lost opportunity.
Many others have spoken up, including the UFCW, about the fact that the bill is a back door way to give the minister unfettered powers. Regulations will be put into place that we will have no oversight over because they are not part of the legislation.
I would argue that the House should not support Bill C-50 as a total because of the immigration changes inherent in the bill.